New Relic's legacy alerting system used an external pinger to verify that customers can reach your site. The pinger service verified application availability by making requests to them regularly, recording errors, and sending downtime notifications when an application was down. This feature has been replaced by enhanced functionality with New Relic Synthetics pinger monitoring and with "host not reporting" alert conditions.

A specific occurrence that has a time stamp; for example, a deployment, error, condition violation, notification, instrumentation change, settings change, etc. Some New Relic products include a list with recent events and activities in their product index or in the Overview page for the selected entity or component.

A colored bar (green, yellow, red, or gray) indicating the status of your app, host, or other entity monitored by New Relic. It also indicates whether the entity has any alert policies assigned to it with New Relic Alerts and whether there are any policy violations. The color-coded health status indicator appears next to the app, host, or other entity's name in every New Relic product index except New Relic Insights.

Service maps use different criteria to report the health of a connection between an app and an external service not monitored by New Relic (for example, a third party API).

incident

An incident is a collection of one or more violations to a condition defined in an alert policy. An incident record includes all of the open and close time stamps for each violation, as well as chart snapshots of the data being evaluated around the time of each violation.

You can view detailed information from the Incidents pages in the New Relic Alerts user interface. You can also select your preference for how New Relic Alerts rolls up policy violations into the incident.

The component of New Relic that connects to your website to verify your website is accessible. New Relic has pingers in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Each pinger attempts to contact your website at least once every two minutes. If enough pingers are unable to reach your website, your application will be considered down.

For in-depth scriptable testing, including real browser tests and testing of API endpoints, see New Relic Synthetics. Synthetics includes free ping monitoring, which allows you to monitor your website from geographical locations around the world.

runbook

A runbook contains standard procedures and operations typically used by system administrators, network operations staff, and other personnel to handle outages, alert incidents, and other situations. If your organization stores runbook instructions as URLs, you can link this information to New Relic Alerts so your personnel has easy access to this information when an alert incident violates the defined policy thresholds.

target

A target is a resource or component monitored by a New Relic product that has been identified in an alert policy's condition. When the condition for that target crosses the defined Critical threshold, New Relic Alerts will create an incident record and send a notification through the defined channel.

threshold

The threshold is the value you define for an alert condition, including an optional Warning (yellow) and required Critical (red) level. The threshold includes what number to alert on, what value it monitors, and what point must pass within the specified frequency or time frame.

The entity's health status indicator in the New Relic UI will change to yellow or red when the threshold is passed for the defined time period. In addition, a Critical (red) threshold's violation will create an alert incident and trigger an alert notification from New Relic Alerts.